It happens at the grocery store near his home in the Golden Triangle, on the 16th Street Mall, in his walks on the Cherry Creek bike path, at his favorite golf course, and virtually everywhere Haven Moses goes.

Whether they recognize him as the former Broncos wide receiver who with quarterback Craig Morton formed the famed M&M Connection on Denver’s first Super Bowl team, or have no clue who he is, people tend to smile. They give him thumbs-up. They wave him on. Many even say thanks for being an inspiration.

“A lot of people continue to have that picture of me in the orange,” Moses said recently over lunch. “That hasn’t diminished any. This is another game for me. They’re cheering for me again. I’m not going to let them down.”

Six years after Moses suffered a stroke that severely affected his left side, he’s making a stunning recovery after a long, difficult fight.

“People ask me if I have a therapist,” he said. “I’m the therapist. I know my body better than anyone. I just do the things that I know are stretching my limits. When I walk, my pace is so much better than before. Going up stairs can be difficult, but I look for difficult things to do. I have to re-train my brain to work, so I even pick the hardest things to do in reaching and scratching.”

Joyce Moses, who met Haven when both were students at San Diego State and has been his wife for 41 years, recalled an incident shortly after the stroke that drove home the magnitude of her husband’s challenge.

“He got out of bed, thinking about his next move,” she said. “He said, ‘I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.’ In all of this, his spirit has further transcended into my spirit. He’s my hero, as well as a lot of others’ hero.”

Jimmy Hayde of Denver is one of Moses’ many friends.

“There are mornings you don’t want to get out of bed,” Hayde said. “There are mornings you don’t want to work out. Then you look at a guy like Haven, who could have rolled over and relied on his fame and renown here and have people take care of him. He’s never stopped for a day trying to get better.

“And for a man who played the roughest sport on the planet, he is one of the kindest, gentlest and most sincere souls I’ve ever known in my life.”

Comfortable on the course

Before the stroke, Moses was a regular at Lakewood’s Fox Hollow Golf Course, where he became friends with the resident pro, Craig Parzybok. After the stroke, he didn’t take a swing at a golf ball for four years. He finally returned to the driving range in 2007.

“I said if there was one place I probably would be comfortable, where I wouldn’t feel self-conscious about how I looked, it would be there,” Moses said. “I tried to pick a day when I didn’t think anybody would be out there on the driving range.

“I took a couple of swings and I thought, ‘I’ll probably not do this again.’ I sat down and looked over the driving range and reminisced about the way it used to be. I tried to comfort myself. And then I got back up and started swinging again. I used one hand. The other hand wouldn’t release for me. But I kept working on it. I said, ‘I can do this.’ I had seen handicapped people play golf. I’d seen people with one arm play golf. That inspired me. Then I started making one or two shots, and it started firing me up.”

Moses now plays full 18-hole rounds. He hopes to play 27 holes on Monday, his 63rd birthday. He also is planning to keep his score for the first time since his stroke.

“It’s a testimony to the type of man he is,” Parzybok said. “He will not give up. It has been a long, hard battle for him, especially being a superstar athlete and being unable to do the types of things he could do. We all get older and you and I can’t do the things we could do when we were younger, but to have such a huge gap between being a wide receiver in the NFL and now just struggling to have normal functions, it must be very dramatic. And yet he keeps plugging away. He keeps working. He keeps trying. At least outwardly, he doesn’t get discouraged.”

Moses continues his long walks, often on the State Capitol steps and grounds or along Cherry Creek. And he pushes himself, with considerable help, most notably from Joyce and their two sons, Bryan and Chris.

“The support of Joyce was the key, because things like this can tear apart a family,” Moses said. “With their help, I’ve really come to look at this as a positive, as setting up the next phase of my life, the fourth quarter of my life, which is going to be that much more special.”

Said Joyce: “We’ve done a lot of praying and a lot of drawing on faith. We’ve been together a long time, since we were youngsters, and that’s helped. We’ve been able to get through this through the grace of God and friends, and there never has been a moment where he’s said, ‘I can’t do this.’ ”

Moses finally is comfortable enough to be planning to attend a Broncos reunion weekend this fall for the first time since his stroke.

“I’ve not been as connected as I could have been,” he said. “I see those guys (individually) every once in a while and they ask me, ‘When are you going to come to the reunion weekend?’ I’ve been away too long. Maybe subconsciously I wasn’t ready to get on that stage again.”

The night things changed

After his retirement as a player, Moses worked at Coors Brewery as an executive from 1981-95, then was the executive director for the Archdiocese of Denver’s Seeds of Hope program.

His world turned upside down in January 2003.

He attended a function at the new Holy Family High School building in Broomfield, then returned to the archdiocese offices. After he walked up the three flights of stairs to his desk, his office neighbor tried to strike up a conversation. “I was mumbling and I said, ‘John, I don’t feel like talking, I don’t feel good,’ ” Moses said. “I sat down and tried to turn my computer on and I couldn’t do anything with the keys.”

He went home, to the family’s condominium. Joyce was at her longtime job at Hyde Park Jewelers.

“I lay down, but I got up to use the restroom about 30 minutes later and I fell down,” Moses said. “My left side just went out. I crawled to the restroom, used the bathroom, and got back in bed.”

When Joyce got home, Haven got up and fell again, and Joyce announced they were going to a hospital. No, Haven pleaded, just let him sleep and he would be all right in the morning.

“She finally convinced me, got me dressed, took me out to the car and we went right over to Denver Health,” he said. “They wheeled me in and in no time were telling me I had suffered a stroke. If I had slept that night, I’d probably still be sleeping.”

His speech wasn’t affected, but his left side was. The prognosis was vague, but this much was certain: He never would be the same again.

“When we went and saw him in the hospital, we didn’t know if he was going to able to walk,” Parzybok said. “Now to look at him and talk to him and watch him move, you can tell if you look real close, but to the average person, you see very little effects of the stroke. . . . He does whatever he can to make everybody’s day a little more enjoyable.”

Looking to make a contribution

Former Broncos linebacker Tom Graham, a Denver businessman who is the father of current Broncos tight end Daniel Graham, was raised in Harbor City, Calif., and said he sneaked in to Harbor City Junior College games to watch Moses star for two seasons before heading off to San Diego State.

“You had this guy with this huge Afro, and he was a bigger-than-life figure for us,” Graham said. “When Haven was traded here from Buffalo (in 1972), I walked up to him and was looking at him as my hero. I told him, ‘I used to watch you when I was a kid!’ ”

Graham burst out laughing and added, “Haven said some things to me that were not nice. But I finally had met my hero.”

While watching Moses’ recovery, Graham’s admiration has grown.

“He’s still the same Haven,” Graham said. “We hook up over at Stanley’s barber shop and when we get in there, we talk about each other for a minute and a half, ‘Where you been . . . you were supposed to call me . . . blah, blah, blah.’ And then we sit down and really talk, and he’s very positive. He struggled with this at first, but now he is very upbeat.”

“I really feel blessed to be at the point I’m at now,” Moses said. “Two years ago, if you had asked me that same question, I would have said I was fine, but with reservations. Things have progressed. The neurological damage certainly presented challenges about how I could function with my left side. That was what I faced, but with what I was able to conjure up from sports — that work ethic that pushes you to know that you can get better at what you’re doing — helped me tremendously.

“If I had broken a leg or arm or had a knee replacement, I would have had a better fix on this. But when the neurological issues and the disconnect from the brain came into play, all of a sudden I was at a loss. I know there are a lot of experiences in life that help us keep things in perspective, and I feel pretty good about my life and my relationship with my family and friends and this community.”

Moses worked at a small private school in Denver for several years after the stroke, but stepped back to concentrate on his recovery in 2007. Now, he’s looking for something else to do. He helped Parzybok at a tournament to benefit the Autism Society of Colorado last week.

“I still have a lot to give, a lot to contribute,” Moses said. “I’m not ready to kick the can yet. I would like to continue to be involved in the things that give back, that will give me a presence that will allow me to tell my story.”

A graduate of Wheat Ridge High School and the University of Colorado, Terry Frei has been named a state's sportswriter of the year seven times -- four times in Colorado and three times in Oregon. He's the author of seven books, including the novel "Olympic Affair" about Colorado's Glenn Morris, the 1936 Olympic decathlon champion; and "Third Down and a War to Go," about the 1942 football national champion Wisconsin Badgers and the players' subsequent World War II heroism.

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